What’s the News: For the first time in medical history, scientists have successfully grown mouse sperm in a laboratory. As Northwestern University cell biologist Erwin Goldberg told New Scientist, “People have been trying to do this for years.” It’s hoped that being able to grow sperm outside the testes will lead to improved fertility treatments for men.

How the Heck:

The concept is simple: Combine the right dosage of chemicals that will provide nourishment to testes in a petri dish. Actually finding the magic amount is a tedious process of trial and error.

The researchers developed offspring using only 100 sperm cells; doctors would like to see “millions if possible” to make successful fertility treatments in humans.

Scientists may have observed “healthy and reproductively competent offspring,” but they don’t delve into the possible long-term side effects of creating people from sperm developed off the traditional route. In vitro sperm creation could be compared to IVF, a technique that leads to greater risk of diabetes and some other conditions. Researchers still aren’t sure why this is, though they have made some headway, discovering that the DNA of IVF-babies actually differs from other children.

Next Up: This technique still needs to be proved in humans, and if it is, it could have wide-ranging effects. For example, in the future, doctors might be able to extract testicular tissue from young boys—who haven’t yet developed mature sperm—and then grow sperm in the lab. Or for infertile men, doctors could extract germ cells, produce sperm, and then find out what’s wrong with them.

Don’t forget the other long term implication. Men will soon be obsolete…

Erik L.

Sure, but fathers, dads, won’t be (not that feminists care, but their daughters and sons will).

Erik L.

…for feminists, yes. Children will still a dad.

William

Erik you obviously don’t know what feminism is all about.

z3ncat

Erik definitely has no grasp of feminism.

I want to know when research like this, along with stem-cell research, will result in fully-functional artificial wombs!

BK

This is great news for people who having survived cancer in childhood find that they have no functional sperm. Now, sperm can be grown from precursor stem cells found in their own bodies. Lets hope the transfer of this technology to the production of human sperm from stem cells is not too far away

WOW

Excellent news for those men who have azoospermia and desperately want to father a child. If this is controlled, safe and only used in extreme cases when nature can’t fix it. This is truly magnificent for couples like us who have been happily married for 10 years and would love to have their very own birth child using their own make-up! Please keep us updated on the developments in this area.